Presently, computer systems are used throughout daily life for both work and entertainment purposes. For example, most office employees are provided with a computer system on which to work. Moreover, many households have a computing system in the home. Many of the home computers are used for various forms of entertainment such as, listening to music, watching television, surfing the Internet, online collaboration while playing a video game, and the like.
Advances in computer processing power, hard drive size, and the like, have continually allowed computers to further integrate with daily activities. For example, a home computer may be used to manage audio and video system in a house. That is, the user will connect a television, speakers, surveillance cameras, and a plurality of other devices into a network with the computing system acting as the controller. Then, with respect to audio activities, for example, a user can play music to different locations throughout the house by simply selecting the desired functionality on the computing system.
However, problems still exist with respect to the utilization of a computer managing a number of activities simultaneously. For example, suppose a user is utilizing a computing system to listen to music. In many cases, in order to perform the music receiving and broadcasting operation, a music application is utilized. When the music application is in operation, it is at the foreground of operation for the computing system. That is, if a mouse is moved or a button is clicked, the input is provided to the application in the foreground and not any applications which may be operating in the background.
While the ability to run several applications concurrently has advantages associated therewith, such functionality is not without drawbacks. For example, if a user is listening to music utilizing a music application and the user begins to surf the web with a web browser application, significant difficulties may be encountered. For example, if a user is surfing the web and wishes to turn down the music in one of the rooms of the house from the music application, then the user will have to select the music application and then interact with the music application to obtain the desired changes. To return to surfing the web, the user would then have to re-select the browser application and continue surfing. This type of application navigation becomes even more confusing as more and more applications are running at the same time in different stages of foreground and background operation.